Volume 58: Selling SUVs to aging white men.
1. When is the middle not the middle?
tl;dr: When a car company is selling SUVs to aging white men.
So, the Superbowl came and went. Brady won for what felt like the 150th time in a contest that quickly became a procession as the team from Tampa dominated their counterparts from Kansas City. But as boring as the game was, the ads somehow managed to surpass it for sheer monotony. So thank goodness Jeep at least brought some controversy.
Just as likely to have been ranked a miss than a hit, I’m talking about the Bruce Springsteen narrated ad calling for national unity. A nauseatingly pathos-laden and moodily shot call for Americans to come together, re-unite, and find the middle ground, shot in a chapel in the geographic middle of the country.
Those calling it a miss point out that as a call for unity this was an overwhelmingly one-sided affair, reflecting as it did, the singular perspective of aging white men bluntly shot through with Christian religious imagery.
Those who thought it was a hit, on the other hand, were clearly attracted to the message of unity and less sensitive to the narrowness of the delivery of the message.
But, really, both of these groups are missing the point. A French/Italian car company like Jeep doesn’t care about American national unity, it cares about selling cars.
Based on the buyer data I was able to dig up, the average Jeep buyer is most likely to be a white man over the age of 55 with a low six-figure household income. In other words, this ad wasn’t about the whole country coming together to unite at all. It was a story of unity being told to the people they think are most likely to buy a Jeep: older, whiter, more Christian men.
Whether it helps them sell more cars or not, I guess we’ll wait and see. The challenge to me, though, is that it didn’t do anything to expand the brand beyond a base that’s most likely to consider a Jeep anyway. So why bother?
2. Logo almost arrested for lewd conduct.
tl;dr: Unfortunate visual metaphor in quickly fixed Myntra logo.
Before last week, I’d never heard of Myntra, an up-and-coming online fashion retailer in India. But then the police got involved because of their logo.
I’d never heard of the police having issues with a logo before, so I had to check it out. Turns out the new logo they’d created had an extremely unfortunate visual metaphor going on that nobody noticed prior to it launching. But after you see it, you just can’t un-see it.
Now, this was all just a storm in a teacup and easily fixed, and I’m sure the folks over at Myntra were just happy for the free publicity they garnered. But I do feel for the team doing the work because it’s really easy for this to accidentally happen. I’ve never been on a project where something similarly unfortunate and embarrassing was actually released - like jaunty comedy male genitalia in the form of a Swastika. But it’s been close a couple of times and every time it leaves you with that sinking feeling in your stomach.
One thing I can say for sure is that whoever did this work will be checking a lot more carefully in the future.